Year: 2010

Here are two new HTML5 experiences you can run in your browser, designed in the spirit of the holiday season and with hardware accelerated HTML5 in mind. Check out Santa’s Workshop, where the speed of your browser on your PC determines how many elves help pack Santa’s bag for the big night, and how fast…

As the technologies around HTML5 continue to develop, people need a better way to distinguish the more experimental parts of HTML5 from the parts ready for use in mainstream sites. The recent browser technology kerfuffle around WebSockets offers a clear example of the problem that developers and consumers will face again and again over support…

The IE Cumulative Security Update for December 2010 is now available via Windows Update. This security update resolves four privately reported vulnerabilities and three publicly disclosed vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer. The most severe vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted Web page using Internet Explorer. Users whose accounts are…

A new research report from independent information-security research and testing organization NSS Labs shows that Internet Explorer 9 Beta protects the user from 99% of socially-engineered malware downloads. According to NSS Labs, “With a unique URL blocking score of 94% and over-time protection rating of 99%, Internet Explorer 9 was by far the best at…

Last time in our series on IE9 support for ES5, we talked about new functions like Object.create and Object.defineProperty, which help you design more reusable components. In this post, we’ll look at another set of new functions focused on something even more basic and common: loops and arrays. Looping over arrays is one of the…

The feedback and conversation on IE9’s Platform Previews and Beta to date from many different communities has made the IE9 development process, and product, substantially better than previous releases. The discussions around hardware-accelerated HTML5 and same markup with the developer community, for example, have informed many changes to the product. Thank you for using it…

Earlier this week, Adobe announced a beta release of Flash Player 10.2 that includes Internet Explorer 9 hardware-accelerated rendering support, previously previewed in Flash Player “Square.” Adobe writes, “we’ve seen significant improvements in Flash Player graphics performance—exceeding 35% in Internet Explorer 9 Beta compared to Flash Player running in previous versions of IE.” Other features…

The W3C working groups, across the board, are making progress completing the important next generation of web standards, getting key specifications to last call, and a focus on defining the test suites for measuring the completeness of implementations. At the same time, there is renewed focus on innovating for the future of the web at…

Typically the job of a web browser is to download and display content– establishing a network connection, sending HTTP requests, retrieving the web page, and downloading and running all of its content. These operations pose non-trivial challenges, and as such, web-browsers are among the most complicated software that most of us routinely use. However, there’s…

Last year I wrote about the W3C’s annual Technical Plenary and Advisory Committee (TPAC) conference. This is where most of the W3C working groups get together for a week of face to face meetings and networking. TPAC 2010 was a couple of weeks ago and here I will highlight some of the topics discussed by…